Do you feel safe walking the streets of London? Do you feel that your police service is nearby, ready to attend if you need us? Nearly half of you said you do not see enough police officers on the beat where you live.

This is according to data from the Neighbourhood Confidence Comparator, a rolling survey of more than 12,000 Londoners by the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, which showed that 47% of people do not believe that the force “Met’ has a visible presence in their area.

And 63 of your local police stations have closed, with officers having to work out of coffee stores and a health food outlet to try and remain accessible to members of the public.

Your police service in London - admired and replicated around the world - is on the precipice of being destroyed.

It is understandable in austere financial times that the police - along with other essential public service - accept our fair share of the burden, however, we strongly believe that the cuts imposed have gone too far, seriously curtailing our ability to provide the best possible service to the communities of London.

We now have less resilience, fewer warranted officers and a drastically weakened front line.

As the late Paul McKeever, a Met officer and former Chairman of the Police Federation of England and Wales, once said: “Cut, is a rather lame description of what the coalition government is doing to the police service. It is completely decimating the service as we know it, disrespecting all that Sir Robert Peel stood for and ruining decades of progress.”